Responding to the Sacred

Michael Bernard-Donals and Kyle Jensen open their introduction to Responding to the Sacred: An Inquiry into the Limits of Rhetoric by observing that rhetoric “has always had a vexed relationship with the sacred” (2), a claim that arguably represents an understatement. The Western rhetorical tradition and the transcendent rarely, if ever, get along. Take Kenneth Burke’s (in)famous move, early in The Rhetoric of Religion, to sidestep the question of the divine and instead adopt a logological approach. To be sure, Burke is interested in language—“words-about-words” (1961, vi), in his phrasing—in part because he sees language itself as shot through with mystery or magic. Yet his logological thesis has often resulted in drawing attention away from the very thing that might make sacred or divine rhetorics worth exploring in the first place. Following the logological thesis, Margaret Zulick argues that it is not rhetoric’s “purview . . . to raise or attempt to answer ontological questions about divinity”: “It is the idea of divinity . . . that should concern us” (2009, 127). Laurent Pernot similarly hints at the tensions between rhetoric and the transcendent: “To say that religious discourse can be examined rhetorically, as persuasive speech following set forms and structures, may arouse suspicion.” He adds: “Scholars who take this approach may be suspected of adopting a rationalist attitude and misunderstanding the very basis of religion, namely, belief in the transcendental” (2006, 236). For that reason and others, Pernot’s exploration again defaults to the logological. “Religion is intimately linked with words” (2006, 235), he explains, so it makes sense that rhetoricians would bypass questions of the transcendent itself and, instead, focus on discourse about the transcendent.What happens, however, when rhetoricians assume the transcendent to be central to rhetoric? Or when they perceive rhetoric to be woven into the fabric of the sacred itself? Or when the transcendent is understood not (necessarily) in terms of the divine but rather as the equally mysterious, ineffable phenomenon that tugs at the edges of rhetorical consciousness, all the while eluding precise (re)cognition? In many ways, these are the questions that drive Responding to the Sacred, an ambitious collection that seeks to explore rhetoric’s diverse relationships to “that which exceeds human capacity” (1). To be sure, the editors make no claim that their collection bridges the divide between the human and the sacred. They are not trying to address the ontological question of the existence of the divine. Rather, apropos of the book’s subtitle, they underscore the fact that “the sacred serves as a limit to rhetoric, a point beyond which rhetoric cannot proceed” (13). Yet, while the collection frequently acknowledges rhetoric’s limits to account for the transcendent, it simultaneously succeeds in expanding those boundaries. By way of intentional engagement with the transcendent, Responding to the Sacred demonstrates that rethinking received limits is possible and productive.The lead chapter, for instance, expands readers’ understanding of rhetoric’s relationship to the sacred by locating the former within the latter. “Rhetoric acts within the sacred,” Cynthia Haynes writes, later adding: “Wherever language is, rhetoric is there to trace its energy (or energeia, as Aristotle terms rhetoric in the Greek)” (29). In a deeply moving essay, Haynes draws on feminist theorists to explore links between rhetoric and the sacred and to recover rhetoric’s feminine characteristics, which have been overshadowed by masculine conceptions of logos. She theorizes these connections between the rhetorical, the sacred, and the feminist, but it is her ethos-based closing that makes manifest the sacred itself. In keeping with her stated purpose to reveal the “organic bond” between “the feminine character of rhetoric and/in the sacred” (29), she ultimately inhabits her exploration and, thus, constitutes an affective response that collapses the boundaries between the sacred and the rhetorical. Can this response be explained fully by rhetorical theory? Perhaps not. But, insofar as rhetoric is always contingent, highlighting the energeia of the sacred by demonstrating its dunamis through means other than a masculine-coded logos invites readers to experience an intersection of rhetoric and the sacred that possibly transcends logology.Other chapters address similarly expansive topics. Ned O’Gorman and Kevin Hamilton explore the quasi-mystical notion of nuclear sovereignty that, despite its highly distributed location, nonetheless “stands as a call” that “organizes the world of nations” (173). Richard Doyle and Trey Conner address similar notions of distributedness by considering the “I” in relation to information ecosystems as explored in Philip K. Dick’s novels. Meanwhile, Jodie Nicotra deals with posthuman notions of attunement to the mystical and the microbial, while Brooke Rollins ponders the sacred call evident in “the powerful allure of gambling” (200). Given this expansive approach, it should come as little surprise that this collection is not focused on religious rhetorics per se. Certainly, some chapters explore such territory. In his chapter about the rhetorical interactions between YHWH and humanity, David Frank argues that the divine itself “develops the capacities for mercy and justice as a function of engagements with and confrontations by humans who protest against God’s injustice and divine violence” (52). Meanwhile, Steven Mailloux explores how inner-directed practices like the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises can inform methods of engaging politically. And then James R. Martel offers equipment for living by naming parallels between the diverse approaches to reading sacred texts espoused by Thomas Hobbes and Walter Benjamin. Still other chapters deal with traditions ranging from ancient Greek divination (Ballif) and Pascal’s Catholicism (Rollins) to practices like the Zen Buddhist zazen and the Apsáalooke Sundance ceremony (Nicotra).The strength of Responding to the Sacred rests in its exploration of diverse manifestations of the sacred and its willingness to push conceptions of rhetorical-transcendent intersections beyond received wisdom. In doing so, the collection participates in what the contributor Daniel M. Gross considers the reenchantment of rhetorical studies. Drawing on Landy and Saler’s 2009The Re-Enchantment of the World, Gross argues that reenchantment constitutes a contemporary response to Max Weber’s disenchantment thesis, in which questions of the sacred were progressively “banished from the secular academy” (237). From that vantage, sacred rhetorical practices such as preaching, praying, and self-transformation were analyzed largely through scientific or social-scientific lenses—“[o]r in terms of form” (237), Gross adds, a possible echo of Burke’s fetishization of that concept in the 1961The Rhetoric of Religion. By contrast, the notion of reenchantment challenges the disenchantment thesis and, thus, the field’s logological emphasis. For Gross, the present collection participates in a trend that seeks to ask questions beyond the symbolic, and he makes the case that such goals can be achieved if rhetoricians “simply grasp what is already on hand” (237). To make that case, he explores what many would consider a quotidian area of symbolic action: interpersonal communication. Via consideration of Freud’s “magic words,” however, he argues that the opposition between enchantment and disenchantment is ripe for deconstruction and that attending to the kinds of inartistic proof already present within the Western rhetorical tradition—think Quintilian’s discussion of the supernatural vis-à-vis “oracles, prophecies, and omens” (245)—can reenchant rhetorical studies by highlighting the extrapersonal.Gross’s point about collapsing the (dis)enchantment binary by grasping what is already at hand has profound implications for rhetorical studies: diverse intersections between rhetoric and the sacred have been there all along, but we have not looked for them. If we did, the field’s notions of rhetoric would change dramatically, a possibility toward which Bernard-Donals and Jensen nod when defining the sacred as “a manifestation of the divine in our everyday worlds” that “becomes something other, and potentially makes us something other as well” (7; emphasis added). Accounting for the presence and role of the transcendent in rhetorical theory, with its logological anxieties about accounting for the transcendent in the first place, fundamentally transforms the nature of rhetorical study and action. The very terms for rhetoric may themselves be shot through with the transcendent, such that rhetoric itself may not be understood as fully as is possible without consideration of the intrinsically transcendent qualities that haunt it.Consider two examples. In her chapter, Jean Bessette explores kairos, a term from the Greek rhetorical tradition that is as ubiquitous in general education speech or first-year writing courses as the holy Aristotelian trinity of ethos, pathos, and logos. And, while no shortage of ink has been spilled on defining that term, Bessette’s definition—“a sacred call that evades our attempts to wrangle it” (232)—transforms the concept into something beyond Kinneavy’s standard “right or opportune time to do something” (qtd. 232). For Bessette, kairos “means this and it means more than this: the concept is imbued with ethical consequences, subjective dislocation, and contradictory tensions between space and time, control of—and by—a situation, and more” (232). When kairos and meaning are contested or uncertain, as it was for the long-unfolding dynamics of the Stonewall Riots and the subsequent changes they wrought, then “the sacred is present” (232). And then, in “Divining Rhetoric’s Future,” Michelle Ballif explores divination in the judgments that constitute Aristotelian notions of deliberative rhetoric, which invokes an “unknowable future” (157) based on similar moments in the past. Ballif directs readers to Aristotle’s contention in On Rhetoric that rhetors “judge of future events by divination from past events” (qtd. 157), a possibility that she then explores via attention to ancient Greek traditions of divination. In doing so, she helps readers see that which already exists in Greco-Roman rhetorical history—attention to the divine, to that which is beyond human (knowing). As Haynes argues with energeia and Gross with inartistic proof, so Bessette and Ballif suggest with kairos and deliberative rhetoric: they are already shot through with the sacred, reenchanted, if only we would take the time and frame the methodologies to look for it.Responding to the Sacred does much to direct us toward such methodologies—not by dismissing the logological, but rather by providing the field with ways of seeing and knowing that help rhetoricians perceive, in and around that textuality, the something beyond that has always been there

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